Cruz and Scott, both McConnell critics, get cold shoulder amid tough races

The Senate Leadership Fund (SLF), a big-dollar fundraising group affiliated with Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.), isn’t helping two of McConnell’s biggest critics in the Senate GOP conference — Sens. Ted Cruz (Texas) and Rick Scott (Fla.).

This has prompted grumbling from conservatives who say McConnell has too much power over Senate Republican fundraising and point out that Cruz, in particular, a longtime McConnell critic, will be heavily outspent by his Democratic opponent, Texas Rep. Colin Allred, and his allies.

Some Republican strategists are also questioning whether the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC), which is run by Chair Steve Daines (Mont.), a member of McConnell’s leadership team, is doing enough to protect incumbents like Cruz and Scott.

This election cycle, the NRSC has focused like a laser beam on knocking off vulnerable incumbent Democrats including Sens. Jon Tester (Mont.) and Sherrod Brown (Ohio), but now Democrats are shifting money to Texas and Florida to put pressure on Cruz and Scott.

Steven Law, McConnell’s former chief of staff who serves as CEO of SLF and One Nation, two major fundraising groups aligned with the Senate GOP leader, told The Wall Street Journal last week that he’s not worried about Cruz or Scott losing.

And he pledged: “If it gets tough, we’ll be there for them.”

But that’s not providing much comfort to Cruz and Scott, whose races were shook up this week when the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee — which had been expected to stay out of Texas and Florida — announced a multimillion-dollar TV advertising buy that’s designed to motivate Democratic donors to pour more money into those two Republican-leaning states.

“It’s been well-known for over a decade, that since SLF has started, that McConnell has used it to reward his allies and punish conservatives. And it’s never been more apparent than this year, when two of the strongest allies of President Trump, Sen. Rick Scott and Sen. Ted Cruz, are being left to fight for their reelection on their own,” a conservative strategist said.

A second Republican strategist said McConnell likes to remind senators how much SLF has helped them in their races, which sends a subtle message to colleagues to get in line on certain issues. Both strategists spoke freely on condition of anonymity.

McConnell pointedly reminded Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) how much of a role the group played in his 2018 election when Hawley last year proposed a bill to limit corporate political giving.

He warned GOP senators at a Tuesday lunch meeting that they would face “incoming” from the “center-right” if they backed Hawley’s bill and read off a list of senators who received substantial support from SLF, according to a CNN report of the discussion.

McConnell told The Hill in a sit-down interview in his office in February that he doesn’t play favorites when it comes to deciding which candidates to back in an election year. He says his calculus is driven by winning and preserving Senate GOP majorities.

And when asked about whether SLF and One Nation should play a bigger role in the Maryland Senate race, for which McConnell personally recruited popular former Gov. Larry Hogan (R), McConnell said he doesn’t control those groups’ spending priorities.

But many Senate Republican lawmakers and strategists say McConnell exerts enormous influence on spending decisions by signaling his preferences while staying well within the requirements of campaign finance laws.

McConnell has raised more than $1 billion for SLF since the group started — and his allies cited his enormous fundraising contribution when Scott challenged him in a leadership race after the 2022 election.

Some Senate Republican conservatives, however, say SLF should be doing more to help Cruz.

And they say that the group’s spending decisions sometimes appear to reward senators who work amicably with Senate GOP leadership while snubbing McConnell’s critics, such as Cruz.

Conservative Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah), a McConnell critic who has long been a thorn in Senate GOP leadership’s side, didn’t get any help from SLF when he faced a harder-than-expected reelection race in 2022 against independent Evan McMullin.

Lee ended up winning the race by more than 10 points.

And the group didn’t put any money into Cruz’s tough 2018 reelection campaign, when he was outspent by his challenger, then-Rep. Beto O’Rourke (D-Texas), and allied Democratic groups. Cruz squeaked by with a 2-point win.

That same year, SLF poured millions of dollars — at least $12.7 million — to help Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) beat Democrat Phil Bredesen in the race for Tennessee’s open Senate seat. She ended up beating her opponent by nearly 11 points.

Meanwhile, Cruz led calls earlier this year for McConnell to resign as GOP leader.

“I think a Republican leader should actually lead this conference and should advance the priorities of Republicans,” Cruz told a room full of reporters in the Capitol in February.

It was the latest of many clashes Cruz has had with McConnell over the years, stretching back to their 2013 fight over strategy, when Cruz led an effort to repeal ObamaCare that spurred a 16-day government shutdown.

Now the two-term Texas senator finds himself once again in a tight race getting dramatically outspent by his Democratic opponent.

In 2018, he beat O’Rourke by convincing voters that the Democratic lawmaker was far too left-leaning to represent the state in the Senate — something O’Rourke helped Cruz do by often speaking without a filter. The Democrat may have committed a big mistake when he endorsed universal background checks and a ban on assault weapons, two unpopular positions in the gun-loving state.

In this year’s tight Texas Senate race, Allred has adopted a much more careful media strategy, picking his media interviews carefully and not straying far from his talking points. This has made it much tougher for Cruz to hammer home the message that Allred has voted often with liberal Democrats in the House. 

Getting a few more million dollars from SLF or the NRSC might help Cruz’s message break through, conservative allies hope.

The second GOP strategist who spoke to The Hill argued that the NRSC has lost sight of protecting Republican incumbents as it has focused more on defeating vulnerable Democratic senators in Montana, Ohio, Nevada and Pennsylvania.

“I’ve seen some of the public polling in Texas. I think that race could be close. Certainly, Allred has raised and spent a lot of money. The NRSC has spent some in Texas. SLF hasn’t and probably doesn’t intend to,” the strategist added. “The blind spot that the NRSC has toward incumbents is a big problem.”

NRSC spokesperson Philip Letsou rejected that criticism.

“NRSC’s top priority is protecting our incumbents. We will ensure they defeat Schumer’s hand-picked candidates and will have their backs,” he said, referring to Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.).

The Senate Republican campaign arm has already spent $3 million in coordinated expenditures with the Cruz campaign on television advertising and has transferred $2.5 million to the Texas Republican Party.

An Emerson College Polling/The Hill survey published Thursday showed Cruz leading Allred by 4 points, 49 percent support to 45 percent. Other polls show Cruz and Allred in a dead heat. 

A Texas Hispanic Policy Foundation poll published Monday showed Cruz leading Allred by only 3 points, within the poll’s margin of error.

Cruz’s allies warn that Democrats will raise and spend substantially more to help Allred than Republicans will raise and spend to defend Cruz, reasoning the incumbent will be fine with former President Trump projected to win Texas by at least 5 points.

Allred reported raising $41.2 million at the end of June compared to the $40 million Cruz had raised at that point in the election cycle.

Altogether, Cruz’s allies expect Republicans to spend between $50 million and $100 million to defend Cruz, and Democrats to spend $100 million to $150 million to knock him off.

Allred raised an astonishing $1 million in 24 hours after speaking at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago last month. The boisterous crowd that packed the United Center chanted “Beat Ted Cruz!” as he walked off the stage.

Scott, who challenged McConnell in a bitterly fought leadership race after the 2022 election, is also in a tough race.

An Emerson College Polling/The Hill survey conducted in early September found Scott leading former Rep. Debbie Mucarsel-Powell (D-Fla.) by only 1 point. But he has a 4.3 percentage point average lead in polls compiled by RealClearPolitics.

Mucarsel-Powell’s campaign reported raising $1 million after the Emerson/Hill poll found she and Scott are in a dead heat.

Her campaign is also expected to benefit from voter turnout driven by an abortion-rights initiative on the 2024 Florida ballot.

Scott, unlike Cruz, has vast personal wealth to draw on to shore up his own campaign and get his message across in Florida’s expensive media markets. He is worth between $270 million and $808 million, according to Finbold.

Law, the CEO of SLF and One Nation, told The Wall Street Journal last week that Texas and Florida won’t be on the Democrats’ radar.

“I think we’ll be OK in both of them. This is a presidential cycle. Neither one of those states is going to be on the radar of the Democrats,” he said.

“The reason why I feel reasonably confident is that both Sen. Cruz and Sen. Scott have done what you want incumbents to do, which is to be prepared to raise money, to take their races seriously and to run good campaigns thus far,” he explained.